Construction Rehabilitation in Civil Engineering at bachelor degree level: A guideline course

ABSTRACT: In general terms, construction rehabilitation is not sufficiently studied worldwide in civil engineering schools. This article proposes an international guideline course on construction rehabilitation for civil engineering students at the bachelor degree level. As we live in an increasingly globalized world, the course aims to prepare students in the same basic concepts so the course content and its focus can be common for all civil engineering programs worldwide. Nevertheless, the course should be considered as a general guideline. At each university, special attention should be paid to the topics that are most common due to the varying construction practices, preservation laws and regulations, and legal jurisdiction governing the scope of practice in construction rehabilitation that exist in the region/country in which the university is located. Moreover, the guideline course should be focused on existing building types, both significant historic ones and those that make up the day-to-day rehabilitation market. To achieve this, the initial step of the methodology was the study and integration of the results obtained in a survey sent to lecturers at 89 universities in 30 countries around the world. Then, a preliminary grouping was done of topics that could be included in the course, preassigning a teaching time to each topic. Later, various renowned experts in the matter audited the tentative guideline course. Finally, based on their opinions and comments, the definitive guideline course was rewritten. Through this course, civil engineering students will improve their ability to recognize, analyze, diagnose, and solve problems that commonly appear in existing buildings, and they will increase their knowledge about maintaining and conserving them

Spatial analysis of urban material stock with clustering algorithms: A Northern European case study

A large share of construction material stock (MS) accumulates in urban built environments. To attain a more sustainable use of resources, knowledge about the spatial distribution of urban MS is needed. In this article, an innovative spatial analysis approach to urbanMS is proposed. Within this scope, MSindicators are defined at neighborhood level and clusteredwith k-mean algorithms. The MS is estimated bottom-up with (a) material-intensity coefficients and (b) spatial data for three built environment components: buildings, road transportation, and pipes, using sevenmaterial categories. The city of Gothenburg, Sweden is used as a case study. Moreover, being the first case study in Northern Europe, the results are explored through various aspects (material composition, age distribution, material density), and, finally, contrasted on a per capita basis with other studies worldwide. The stock is estimated at circa 84 million metric tons. Buildings account for 73% of the stock, road transport 26%, and pipes 1%. Mineral-binding materials take the largest share of the stock, followed by aggregates, brick, asphalt, steel, and wood. Per capita, the MS is estimated at 153 metric tons; 62 metric tons are residential, which, in an international context, is a medium estimate. Denser neighborhoodswith a mix of nonresidential and residential buildings have a lower proportion of MS in roads and pipes than low-density single-family residential neighborhoods. Furthermore, single-family residential neighborhoods cluster in mixed-age classes and show the largest content of wood. Multifamily buildings cluster in three distinct age classes, and each represent a specific material composition of brick, mineral binding, and steel. Future work should focus on megacities and contrasting multiple urban areas and, methodologically, should concentrate on algorithms,MS indicators, and spatial divisions of urban stock

Regional landscape strategies and public participation: towards implementing the European Landscape Convention in Sweden

Sweden has recently decided to ratify the European Landscape Convention (ELC). Methods for implementation have been discussed for both the ELC and related national environmental objectives. Thus, the Swedish Government decided that seven County Administrative Boards should undertake pilot studies for Regional Landscape Strategies (RLS) during 2006–2007. The RLS pilot projects aimed at a new and more effective approach for conservation and sustainable land use at regional level. Additionally, RLS should also function as a method for implementing the ELC and other environmental objectives. One specific focus of the pilot studies was on developing methods for public participation. Other important issues were to involve different administrative sectors, municipalities and regional authorities in the process, as well as attaining a good balance between conservation and profitable land use. This chapter presents some of the results from the RLS case study in Vellinge municipality, Scania (Skåne), Sweden’s southernmost province. The focus of the study was on public participation in particular by equestrians and landowners. The first ‘bridleway organization’ of its kind in Sweden was established as a direct result of the project